With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an
apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries,
and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in
Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell
the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to
survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan
Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare
intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice.
Dipping into various forms--essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and
historical documents--Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and
personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of
cultural and personal memory.